


Lost and Found

by Dame_Lazarus



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Airplane Crashes, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, But also: hope!, Cults, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Healing, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Jaime’s thoughts on essential oils, Murder, Online Dating, POV Sansa Stark, Rural gothic, Sharing a Bed, Witty Banter, r/jaimebrienne, tw: children in danger, tw: cult violence/brainwashing/general depravity, tw: non-con of a non-sexual nature, tw: wartime sexual violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:48:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23607052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dame_Lazarus/pseuds/Dame_Lazarus
Summary: When I was a girl of four-and-ten, I was lost, and then I was found. It’s a story that doesn’t sound like something you could believe. Most parts of it, when I tell it, makes folks think I’m a liar or crazy or both. Lucky for me, I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks these days.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth, Sandor Clegane/Sansa Stark
Comments: 47
Kudos: 79
Collections: Jaime and Brienne Subreddit Fan Creation Challenges





	Lost and Found

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is brought to you by: _The Furious Hours_ audiobook's lush southern accent; the story of Juliane Koepcke, Amazon plane crash survivor; many episodes of People Magazine Presents: Cults; and the r/jaimebrienne subreddit challenge, which for this round is 'online dating.' I'd like to blame quarantine insanity for this bonkers combination, but the truth is that I started this fic back in February.
> 
> Major thanks go to [PrettyThief](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyThief/pseuds/PrettyThief) and [SeeThemFlying](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeeThemFlying/pseuds/SeeThemFlying), who both listened to me ramble on about this story over DM in various states of intoxication. I also owe PrettyThief an extra major thanks for her field medicine knowledge for the plane crash scenes, though all errors in execution are purely my own. 
> 
> Apologies for my hand-waviness about how military bureaucracy and titles work--"it's the Targaryens, so whatevs" seems to work in canon already, so I'm using that excuse as well.

When I was a girl of four-and-ten, I was lost, and then I was found. It’s a story that doesn’t sound like something you could believe. Most parts of it, when I tell it, makes folks think I’m a liar or crazy or both. Lucky for me, I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks these days.

My story has lots of beginnings to it. One is when my daddy died in the Red Waste, a general in the war that my country’s been fighting my whole life for no reason that anyone can remember. Rebels captured him during patrol one day, and soon my brother Robby took his own regiment against orders clear across the desert to free him. Two weeks later they both showed up in a video the rebels posted online, machetes slicing clean across their necks and their heads rolling lifeless in the red dirt. It was on TV a lot that year. They cut away before it got real gruesome but you could still see the worst part: my daddy and my big brother realizing they were about to die. I still see their eyes when I close mine, sometimes.

Another: when we lost our house and our land and our oil to that dreadful Mr. Bolton, all because of a contract that no one believed that Daddy ever could have signed. We fled in the night with all the valuables we could carry—me, Ma, my sister Arya, and my two baby brothers. We had to leave our dogs behind with Mr. Cassel the groundskeeper and all the little kids couldn’t stop crying. Ma drove our minivan without stopping, fifteen hours, most of ‘em dark, to our uncle’s house in the Vale Mountains.

Except he wasn’t my uncle. He was some creepy little guy named Petyr who knew my ma and Aunt Lysa from when they were kids. Aunt Lysa’s husband took ill and he moved in on her and her inheritance real quick. Then Lysa turned up dead not long after. Suicide, my new uncle said. Seconal and scotch. That should have been a sign, but Ma didn’t see it. “He’s always been a true friend to me,” she said, crossly, when I asked why we were running straight to some strange man in the mountains that none of us knew. She told me to shut my mouth, to obey my elders, so that was the end to that.

It didn’t take long for things to get weird. Uncle Petyr got his claws into Ma, too, and got her listening with him to crazy shit on the internet about the End Times and a man foretold to wield a flaming sword and deliver us all from evil. Then we were packing up again and joining up with the other true believers and getting new names: Lady Stone, Brother Stone, Alayne. That last one was me. By then my sister had already taken our little brothers and disappeared into the darkness. She begged me to go with her, but I couldn’t do it. Ma would keep us safe, I thought. So there’s another beginning for you.

If I really had to think about it, though, there’s only one true beginning to my story. It starts, like all the best stories, with a meeting of two heroes who hear tell of a damsel in distress.

* * *

While I was crying my eyes out, trapped in a fancy house in those goddamn mountains, getting ready to get ready for the End Times, my heroes were living depressing little lives in a big city. They weren’t heroes yet. They were just sad grownups looking for love and for a purpose in life and finding neither.

They didn’t plan to meet, and when they did meet, they didn’t much want to be there. They were both signed up for the latest damned dating app, they told me, because their meddling best friend and nosy brother, respectively, made them do it.

Brienne, the more heroic of the two, as far as I’ve always been concerned, had a run of bad luck with men just before that first meeting. She barely had time to meet anyone, first off: she was a Global Games level-good biathlete—that’s the one where you race on skis to shoot at a target before anyone else does—and so she spent most the year training in the Vale or in the snows up north near where I grew up. She only came down to King’s Landing in the summers, and that was to work on her shooting at the best gun club this side of the Narrow Sea. But there were always hangers-on who managed to find her: a middle-aged trainer with the wrong motives; an old childhood friend who kept texting her marriage proposals when he got real drunk.

And then, there was her ski instructor. Renly Baratheon. A dark-haired handsome devil, brother to the nation’s most promising young senator, and the long-term object of Brienne’s unreturned and misguided affection. It was the weekend when she skipped his high-profile wedding to one Mr. Loras Tyrell, claiming she’d fell ill, that the meddling best friend I mentioned, Podrick Payne, set up a dating profile for her on the app. She protested, but only weakly, because she’d reached the vengeful phase of her moping, and when the first message that came through that wasn’t a proposition or a photo of a man’s nether regions, she agreed to go meet the man who sent it.

That profile belonged to a strapping blonde guy, well-muscled, in his desert camo: a Red Waste vet named Jaime Lannister. Trouble was, the message wasn’t from him. It was from his little brother, just pretending he was. Partly this was because Tyrion, who grew to four feet tall and then stayed there, always wanted to be his golden brother, admired by lads and ladies alike. But the main reason was that Tyrion wanted Jaime to move on with his life, now that he was discharged and back home. All he’d done since his arrival was drink alone late into the night and scroll through his stepsister’s social media. She’d married that promising young senator, Bobby Baratheon, the one related to the handsome unavailable ski instructor, while he was deployed. (At the end of the day, Westeros is a pretty fuckin’ small world.) He could pretend that it wasn’t so, but he could think of nothing else.

There’s a nasty rumor there, one that popped up for a hot minute during the senator’s campaign, but I have it on good authority that it’s true. To hear Tyrion tell it, as soon as Cersei’s mother married their dad Tywin, she was prancing around in short shorts and lounging by the pool in her bikini, and preteen Jaime never had eyes for anybody else after. If their parents had been around more, they might’ve put a stop to it, but they weren’t, and they didn’t. When he saw the gossip in the news about her engagement, he called her long-distance from the base in Qarth, not caring what time it was back in Westeros. “What, did you expect that I’d marry _you_?” she laughed. “Let’s face it, you probably aren’t even coming back.” (I never met Cersei Baratheon, but she always sounded like a real bitch and half.)

But then, Jaime was home, and Cersei found another young thing in Bobby’s texts, and she’d show up at his and Tyrion’s apartment crying at 2 a.m and then disappear into Jaime’s room. After six months of that, it was either a new romance for his brother or prescription-strength sleeping pills, and Tyrion didn’t like the idea of medication he couldn’t mix with his gin martinis.

Of course, Jaime was livid when he found out. “Identity theft is a crime, you know,” he told him. Tyrion showed him some videos of Brienne shooting at her targets out in the snow-capped mountains to try to persuade him that it was a good idea anyways. He figured that if Jaime was cowed by Cersei, who had loved bossing them around since the day they met, he might take a liking to a girl that looked like she could snap him in half.

He was right. The videos got his attention. And so it was a date. A half-assed one, sure, but it would be a date that changed a whole lot of lives.

* * *

Brienne chose the bar. It was near as old as King’s Landing itself; the wooden bar top was supposedly carved way back when we still had kings and the barkeep certainly looked just as old himself. It was well-lit, which Podrick said was important for her safety, along with not taking any drinks she didn’t make herself. If you don’t know Brienne, you won’t understand why she rolled her eyes at that. Brienne is tall, taller than any woman, and even most men, and she’s strong enough to throw any of us across a room if we tried anything. Most wouldn’t even try. Even drugged up she could probably do some damage.

Still, she played it safe, and she chose a real lit-up bar for her first date. She didn’t even notice Jaime come in. She was fixated on the TV right above where the barkeep lined all the liquor up against an old-ass mirror. It was playing a story about me, Sansa Stark, little girl lost. The story was everywhere that summer. My half-brother Jon from Daddy’s first marriage, at a podium next to fierce little Arya, begging for tips about the whereabouts of his missing little sister, kidnapped by her ma and her crazy step-dad-uncle. At the time, I was watching my mother become less of herself everyday and listening to the ranting of wild-eyed Brother Thoros from sunup to sundown, so I missed it all.

Brienne didn’t, though. She trained up north near my daddy’s family home and down in the mountains near the place where we were last seen, and so my story had a special place in her heart. Sometimes during those months when we were lost she would look us up online just to see if we got found. It always broke her heart, she said, when there was no new news.

She sat there, looking into me in the eye via my old seventh-grade class portrait, when Jaime Lannister clapped his strong hand on her shoulder. He knew the look of her already from the internet but was trying to play it cool.

“You must be Brienne,” he said. She nodded but kept one eye on the television, too; the press conference was wrapping up.

He gestured with his head to my happy past self on the TV screen. “I knew her father out in Qarth. Sad, isn’t it?”

“I am just so worried for her,” Brienne admitted, turning to him.

“Did you know her?”

Brienne’s face, she was sure, turned bright red. “No, I just...it’s terrible.” There was a long silence then, and Brienne worried that she came across as a loon. She hadn’t even said _nice to meet you_ or _I suppose you are Jaime_ or _how are you related to the Lannister Lannisters_ or any of those other pleasantries. But then Jaime bought them both beers, and steered her over to a table by the window, and she thought the worst was over.

“I saw on your profile that you shoot,” he said as they sat down.

Brienne bristled at that. “I’m a professional marksman. I have four gold medals.”

He raised his eyebrows and grinned, clinking his glass with hers in an attempt at an apology that went completely unnoticed. “Did you ever think of enlisting?” Tyrion had told him to ask questions if he felt nervous. He probably should have given him a little more direction.

“God, no,” she replied, laughing, trying to inject some joy into the conversation. “I couldn’t imagine doing that.”

“So you’re one of those,” Jaime said, though he fiercely denies it now.

“I just mean,” she bit out, flustered, “that I never thought it was really for me.”

Jaime took a long sip of his beer and didn’t reply.

As you can imagine, they both finished their drinks quick as could be and left with stiff farewells. They didn’t even get much farther than telling each other where they grew up and where in the city they lived now. Brienne didn’t even know what Jaime did for a living. They just wanted to get away from each other. They won’t admit it, now, but I’d bet a pretty dollar that they both were thinking ugly thoughts about each other by the end. I haven’t dated much in my time, but I have seen it in movies, and I think this was as bad as you could get.

Both of them agreed. They agreed so much that they couldn’t stop thinking about it. Brienne blamed herself for getting off on the wrong foot, bringing up dark things on the first date and reminding him about the war. Jaime blamed himself, too, and how the just the thought of battle put him right back there in the desert, ready to fight. As they drifted off to sleep, regret pooling in their bellies, they thought of each other. Brienne felt Jaime’s hand on her shoulder, warm and solid and soothing. Jaime pictured Brienne’s legs in those biathlon videos, probably, because he’s a man, but he’ll only admit to finding her deep blue eyes impossible to shake.

The next day he sent her a text. _Sorry that was such a shitshow. My fault. Let me make it up to you._

Brienne believed in second chances. For him, but also for herself. No talk of war or missing girls this time. She’d behave like a normal person and at least not feel like trash about this whole thing.

_No worries. It wasn’t just you. Let me know when you’re free._

He sent her an address. _Saturday, noon. Be prepared for an adventure._

* * *

Here’s something I maybe didn’t mention: all these people are rich. There’s Renly and Senator Baratheon, whose family has been rich for so long that they have an ancestral castle and can call themselves Lords of Storm’s End if they want. There’s Jaime and Tyrion Lannister, whose dad built a news empire from the ground up and so couldn’t resist decorating all their homes in gold right down to the toilets. Even Brienne and I came from money, but a different sort: our families pulled our wealth from the land. My daddy had Winterfell Oil and its rigs all over the north, and Brienne’s had a rugged island with big views, beaches full of wild horses, and clusters of peaceful vacation retreats for the wearied city dwellers up in the capital.

Jaime’s kind of rich really gets under the skin of someone like Brienne and me. One bad turn of the sky and everything could be lost for us. The Lannister rich is the kind of rich where you have everything you need, but where you’re raised to think it’s still something special. Folks like the Baratheons see their money as a duty, an encumbrance, not to be discussed—they’re tolerable. But the Lannisters—they can’t help themselves from constantly reminding you how full their pockets are.

Brienne trained so much that she didn’t really keep up on the society gossip. But she knew the name Lannister, and she had looked them up online over breakfast, and she got a real strong sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Guess she wouldn’t have to ask what he did for a living, because his dad had so much money that he didn’t need to work. She also came across some old articles titled _#Lannicest,_ but she decided it would be too invasive to click on the links. (So noble, Brienne. I would have torn through all those articles and come to the date with my own list of questions.) It’s only one more date, she told herself. After that she wouldn’t need to worry about any of this.

The address Jaime gave Brienne was a tiny airport in the Crownlands. He planned to take her on a picnic on the white sand beaches of Dorne. By car from King’s Landing, it takes six hours to get to Dorne. By plane, though, only two. Jaime got his pilot’s license in high school, and flew cargo planes in the war, and for a welcome-home present, his dad bought him his own little pleasure jet that Jaime named Oathkeeper. Ironic, folks would say behind his back, considering how he got back here from deployment: discharged after letting his commanding officer get blown up. By accident, of course, though many didn’t think that was the whole of it. Jaime didn’t care. He knew the name of that plane to be true enough, in his heart.

Brienne wasn’t sure how to feel, pulling onto the tarmac and seeing her date leaning against his gleaming six-seater, its name written in red and gold on the side. Everything about this was ridiculous, she told me. It was like walking into an airplane commercial. The sun glinted off the plane and cast his golden skin in a warm glow. The wind ruffled his short hair and she could even make out the muscles under his shirtsleeves as she walked up. He was handsome, fine, but there was the small problem of his personality—whatever put that smug look on his face. What the fuck was she thinking?

(Those were real thoughts that went through her head just then, she says.)

“My lady,” he said. “Our voyage awaits.” She was trying real hard to be polite this time so she didn’t roll her eyes, which if I know Brienne, she definitely wanted to do.

Attempts to impress Brienne almost never work. Especially not with nothing behind them. So if Jaime thought she’d swoon because he had his own plane, or because that plane had soft leather seats, or because he planned a date on a fancy beach somewhere down south, he’d be dead wrong. She climbed into the seat next to him in the cockpit and put her backpack down between her feet and used all the willpower she had to stay there.

Still, she couldn’t help but admire the cut of him, glancing out of the corner of her eye. Jaime relaxed back, confident in the pilot’s seat, cruising up into the clouds with a dead serious look on his face.

For his part, Jaime was determined not to bring up the four years he’d spent in the desert, even though in those few tense minutes during takeoff and landing he always felt like he was back there all over again. Instead he pointed out the different kinds of clouds on the horizon. The tall spires of King’s Landing, growing smaller as they ascend.

“As we get a little farther south,” he said, “you’ll be able to catch a glimpse of your Sapphire Isle.” It was a lovely day. The view of the Stormlands coast would be stunning from on high.

“How far south are we going, exactly?” Brienne asked, because in his attempt to be suave, and keep his shit together, he had utterly forgot to explain anything about the date he planned.

“Right,” he said. “How do you feel about a picnic in Sunspear? I brought provisions and the wine is chilling as we speak. They have the nicest beaches you’ve ever seen.” As my daddy would have said, Jaime had a real case of foot-in-mouth disease. Honestly, he has it still.

“We have quite nice beaches on Tarth,” Brienne said tersely. “World-renowned, in fact.”

“Ah, yes,” Jaime replied. “That’s right.”

In awkward silence, Jaime cruised the plane over the rolling green hills of the Riverlands. Those hills used to be mountains, but they’re so old now that they’re worn down smooth and grassy. It would have been quite a view, I bet, but Brienne and Jaime didn’t get much time to enjoy it. Not just because things were getting tense again in that cockpit, though—because just then the engine made a terrible grinding noise, like nails on a metal chalkboard, like all the strings on a fiddle played at once, and the plane gave a sickening lurch in the air.

Neither of them remember much about what came next. It’s hard to picture a plane falling from the sky. Maybe Jaime spun the steering wheel, all frantic, like my brother Robby did when he skidded out on a patch of black ice on the road driving me and my friend Jeyne to a party. The car turned all the way round in a circle and it seemed to go by real slow, then. I wonder if it all went slow for them, too: the green hills getting nearer and nearer, the dials on the dashboard beeping, Jaime trying to get the wings to obey.

What Brienne does remember: waking up to a crop of big black birds flying overhead and thinking, _I can’t breathe_. She was still strapped into her seat, but the rest of the plane was gone. It’s a wonder she wasn’t dead right there and then, and she thought for more than a minute that she was.

The seat had fell right side up, best we can figure, but at some point on impact it had toppled over. Brienne’s left arm took most of the hit; the top bone was broken clean though. The rest of her fall was broken by the side of her head. She had a nasty headache brewing, and still to this day she gets bad ones, ones where she has to lie quiet in a dark room. And then there were other injuries, ones that seemed minor in comparison, ones she wouldn’t even notice for a while yet: cracked ribs, a twisted ankle, a deep cut on the back of her leg.

She lie there, taking in painful breaths, when she heard the sound. At first she thought it was metal falling. A piece of the plane, slowly wrenching free. But it wasn’t. It was a man screaming.

Brienne did what she thinks is a totally normal thing, something that anyone would do in her place, she swears: she unbuckled her seatbelt, rolled out onto her good arm, and staggered on up to standing. Her left arm hung useless. The plane, or what was left of it, was dashed on the side of a rocky hill behind her. She took one unsteady step after another toward the wreckage. Jaime screamed again, feral and gravelly, a sound almost not human. Brienne broke into a run, her cracked bones jostling.

Jaime lay trapped inside the wreckage, the smell of burning rubber and spilled oil sending his mind reeling. He had a lot of invisible injuries, too, bruised organs, cracked bones, a rattled brain. Jaime was focused in that moment, though, on the one injury he could see: his right hand, pinned under a raw-edged slice of metal that used to be the side of the plane. He’d tried and tried to pry it loose. If he could just get his arm out he could stand and flee from the corner he was stuck in. But the metal cut at his good hand. It cut at his knees when he tried to use his legs. And the more he moved, the more the metal dug into his wrist, slicing, slicing, slicing. Blood coated the ground. His blood. It coated him all over.

When Brienne bent her head and stepped into the wreckage alongside him, he looked up at her and stared.

“Is this hell?” he asked. “Which one do you think it is?” He hoped in that moment that perhaps they were dead. Then, the worst would be over.

She shook her head. “The Riverlands.”

“Close enough.”

She bent down next to Jaime, wincing. “Are you all right?”

“I crashed the fucking plane, Brienne,” he said. He was losing feeling in the fingers in his right hand. “I’m stuck.”

Brienne reached over to feel his wrist. He yelped and grabbed hard on her leg with his free hand. The wrist was broken, for sure, and the jagged edge of debris was pushed halfway down into his flesh. She knew next to nothing about first aid, and she wasn’t totally clear on if moving the sheet of metal away would do him good. What if pulling out the metal caused everything to get worse?

“Damn it, are you just going to hold my hand, or are you going to do something?”

Brienne stood, woozily. Fine. If he wanted something, she would give it to him. She stuck her foot under the edge of the wall that trapped him and braced her hand on the chunk of cockpit on the other side. She pushed. She lifted. Jaime cried out. She lifted again. But nothing would budge. Brienne stood back and looked at the wreckage of seats and wires and crumpled metal behind them. She was looking for something undefined, anything that would help, when she saw it, resting pristinely on the muddy ground amidst all the chaos.

Her backpack.

She stumbled on over to it and picked it up. Back at Jaime’s side, she lowered down once more and hunched over the bag, sliding the zipper up furiously with her good arm.

He lifted his head from the ground and squinted at her like she had grown an extra arm.

“You did tell me to prepare for adventure,” she said, pulling out the contents with a raspy chuckle. A small first aid kit in a tiny tin with a red star on the lid. A crushed box of granola bars. A blanket, a sweatshirt, a pair of sunglasses. And at the bottom: a knife.

Brienne’s father had given it to her, years and years ago, a birthday gift. It sat in a square leather sheath, just like the one he had and the one his father had before him. You never know when you might need it, he’d said. She had just thrown it in there, an afterthought in her nervous haze. _Well, he wasn’t kidding_ , she thought, pulling it from her bag.

She drew the blade and held it in the air between them.

“No,” Jaime said, hoarse. Brienne hadn’t even been thinking of doing that. But. She was now. Jaime wasn’t the only one who could smell the fuel in the air and wonder if something even worse could befall them if they stayed put.

“You’re almost there, to be honest,” she said quietly. “We need to get out of here.”

Jaime let out a long hissing breath. But then he nodded.

“My belt,” he told her. “For after.” He was remembering dark battlefield stories; she was remembering first aid training from the sixth grade. But they both understood. She put the knife down in her lap and they both reached for his belt to unbuckle it.

“I’d hoped we’d do this under much different circumstances,” he joked.

“Now is really not the time, Jaime,” Brienne said brusquely, pulling the belt loose from around his waist. That just made him laugh more.

She picked the knife back up. His laughter stopped real quick then.

“Just do it,” he said.

Jaime was lying curled on his right side, trapped arm stretched out ahead. Brienne pushed him firmly onto his stomach and leaned her knee onto his back. She reasoned that she needed to hold him down. Jaime says he could barely breathe as it was and it didn’t help with her biathlete build crushing him. He doesn’t dare say that around Brienne, though, or she’s sure to smack him right on the face.

Cutting through a man’s joint is hard, I imagine. Brienne says it’s not unlike trying to chop up a chicken before roasting. She leaves that task to me these days. No surprise as to why. The sounds of a blade hacking through squelching flesh and cartilage, the sounds of bones popping apart—they bring to mind that terrible day. They bring to mind the howl Jaime made then, in that ravine in the middle of nowhere, as Brienne freed him from the wreckage.

Jaime’s blood painted them both, after; Brienne’s hands and shirt were slick with it as she pulled the belt tight around his wrist. Jaime stared down at his missing hand and trembled, fierce and uncontrollable. Brienne wiped down the knife and shoved everything back into her bag. She stood and pulled Jaime to his feet, and dragged him into the open air. “What the hell did you do to me?” he snarled. He was way too weak with the shock of it all to push her away, though.

Jaime’s forgotten all of this. But Brienne—it’s practically branded into her mind.

* * *

I can’t say I’ve ever been a big believer in God. My ma for sure was; when times got tough, she retreated with her prayer book, whispering, and when that wasn’t enough, she found Brother Thoros online to pray louder on her behalf. Daddy would take me and the other kids outside, among the big trees on our land, and tell us to feel the stillness of nature in the rustling of their branches. If God is anywhere, he said, it’s here, on the land, all around us. Neither was right for me, growing up.

But, I don’t know how I could be a hundred percent an unbeliever after hearing how Brienne and Jaime went through what they did and came out living. A plane wreck usually kills all souls on board. Brienne and Jaime got banged up, bloodied, but they stood up and walked away from that wreck, a bag of supplies in hand. And knowing what I know about what came next, for me, for others, I can’t help but feel the divine in it.

It was midday when Jaime took off from the Crownlands, afternoon when they crashed, and early evening when they pulled themselves out of the ruins. Brienne had a pounding head, and the adrenaline keeping her injuries hid wore off with each step, but with Jaime dazed and oozing blood, she found herself in charge. She dragged him, protesting the whole damn way, up the side of the hill and out of that ravine. I’m sure it was very unpleasant. Soon, it would be dark, and she needed to get them elsewhere. In the movies, when you crash planes and cars, they leak fuel and then they blow up. She wasn’t sure if that was going to happen here but she didn’t want to find out just as they were drifting off to sleep.

The hills kept multiplying, or so it felt. Up one hill; down another hill. Around some rocks; over some other rocks. It all looked the same at a certain point. Grass. Shrub. Mud.

“Where the fuck are you taking me, you stupid woman?” Jaime snapped. (He denies this, as well, but he isn’t the most reliable narrator of this period in time, I’ve found.)

“Away from the explosion,” Brienne replied.

He stopped and looked around wildly. “Explosion?!”

“Potential explosion.”

He laughed derisively at that. Brienne contemplated just leaving him on the side of the hill.

At last, with the sun setting all pretty and orange over their heads, Brienne decided to stop for the night. Mostly ‘cause she felt like she was about to keel right over. She scouted a cluster of tallish rocks and pulled Jaime down next to her among them. He wasn’t happy about this in the least.

Unable to do much resisting, he just flopped back against the mossy stone petulantly. “What are you doing?”

She opened up her backpack and took out the granola bars. There were six of them. She wasn’t hungry, but it gave her something to do. “Stopping. It’s getting late.” She peeled the wrapper on a bar and handed him one. He took it with his uninjured hand and stared down at it with a look of defeat in his eyes.

“We’re going to die out here,” he mumbled. “If we don’t get eaten by wolves, it’ll be starvation. Are there any vitamins in here, even?”

“Eat it. It’s better than nothing.” She hoped the comment about the wolves was meant only in jest.

“I wish I never came out here,” he said through a reluctant mouthful of granola. “It was a terrible idea. I never wanted to be on that app. My brother did it behind my back. Says I’m miserable and making everyone else miserable.”

 _I can relate_ , Brienne thought. But she’s too nice to have said that aloud, then, at least. And she probably was distracted by thinking about how she knew it was too good to be true, a handsome guy finding her on the app under his own steam. “If it makes you feel better,” she said, unwrapping her own granola bar, “I didn’t want to go either. My friend signed me up. Said I was moping, after someone. After he got married.”

“So here we are. Miserable together, in the middle of fucking nowhere. If I had something to drink I’d raise a toast.”

Brienne even now curses herself for not bringing a water bottle along that day. She had realized she forgot it halfway to the airport. As if she could have predicted what would come next. “I didn’t bring anything,” she admitted.

“So much for being prepared. Some adventurer you are. We’ll die of thirst before we die from the wolves, at least.”

It was too dark and she was too tired, but for a split second Brienne contemplated going in search of water so he wouldn’t go to his death blaming her. Thank the heavens that she came to her senses real quick on that idea. “We’ll look in the morning. Thirst won’t take us that quick. There has to be water somewhere. It’s called the Riverlands, for God’s sake.”

The sun was completely down now, and the cool summer dusk was settling over them. Jaime wondered how she could be so sure that they’d wake up again if they fell asleep. But that’s Brienne for you. When things go to hell, she’s the first one to stand up and say that it will pass. The sun’s setting, but it will rise again, too.

Brienne reached for Jaime’s arm. In middle-school first aid they told her never to make a tourniquet unless you wanted your arm to fall off. Jaime had been right, though: his belt had stopped the bleeding.

 _He’ll be insufferable if I have to cut the rest of his arm off_ , she thought then, illogically. Logically, she must have known that it would be worse for him to get even more ill. So she started to slowly loosen the belt above his severed hand.

He jerked his arm back. “Leave it.”

“If I leave it, you could lose the rest of your arm.”

“Says who?”

“My first aid instructor. I got certified so I could start skiing by myself.”

“When was that, twenty years ago?” He shook his head, his face both purple from the evening light and red with frustration. “So glad to have your ancient memories of light medical treatment on hand to save me.”

“Jaime.” Her voice sounded stern and gentle despite her deeply wanting to punch him in the face. (I mean, probably. I would.)

He just stared at her then: the first eye contact since she found him in the wreckage. The emotions she saw in his eyes pushed her to new depths of pity. Sadness, rage, embarrassment—and most unsettling of all, terror.

She reached out for him again, just resting her hand on his forearm, reassuringly. “If it gets worse when I take it off, we’ll put it back on. I promise.”

So he let her. She unwound the belt from his arm. Some blood flowed from the wound and he drew a sharp breath. But they both knew it wasn’t half as bad as those first few moments inside the wreck. Brienne pulled the sweatshirt out from her bag and wrapped it clumsily around his arm.

“You bring a sweatshirt with you in the summer, but forget water.” He chuckled, low and dark.

 _You flew our plane into a hillside_ , Brienne wanted to say.

“Lie back,” she said instead. “Rest.” She pulled out the blanket, a rough old thing, intended more for laying down on the grass than anything else, and spread it over them both on the ground. Jaime did as he was told without a word. One of the few times that will ever happen in this lifetime, I wager. And I wasn’t even there to see it.

Brienne lay on her back in the dirt and grass and looked up at the stars. She forgot how there were so many of them away from the orangey lights of the city. It was dazzling, like a fine mist of fresh snow suspended in midair, as far as her eye could see.

Next to her, Jaime shifted uncomfortably side to side.

“Jaime, what are you doing?” she asked, quiet, though there was no one anywhere close to hear.

“I don’t know,” he replied, just as hushed. “Dying, probably. I survived all that bullshit out in Qarth just to die on a date in the fucking wilderness.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not going to die. You’re going to live. We’re both going to live.” She reached out to squeeze his arm reassuringly, again. He missed her hand when she moved it away. I guess there’s something about a woman cutting your hand off after you almost kill her that brings you closer together, he says now.

They slept.

* * *

Brienne woke to a blazing hot morning and Jaime straddled on top of her. It sounds sexy when I put it that way, but it isn’t. I mean, not on purpose.

He had climbed out of the blanket, back facing her, and crouched over her legs. She couldn’t see around him, so when she woke she winced and pulled herself up to sitting.

“Jaime? What’s happening?”

“Shhh,” he hissed. “Stay behind me.”

That’s when she saw it: a giant fucking bear, sniffing around by her backpack. From where she sat, far away, it seemed fluffy and cute, though she knew that was ridiculous. That bear could rip their faces off, she had no doubt.

Jaime clutched Brienne’s knife in his hand. He stared intently at the bear, holding the knife out in front of him as if the bear would notice or care that he had a weapon.

Brienne pulled herself up closer to Jaime’s back. “Do you really think you are going to fend off that huge bear with my hunting knife?”

“Quiet. And no sudden movements.” The bear was tearing into her backpack, flailing it around. “It probably can smell the blood.”

“It’s a bear, Jaime, not a velociraptor,” she whispered in his ear. “It looks happy enough with just the granola bars.” The bear shook the bag again, and the metal first aid kit clanged.

“What the hell do you have in there?”

“That’s probably the first aid kit.”

He turned then to face her, sudden movements apparently okay when he was the one making them. “You have a first aid kit? This whole time, you had a first aid kit?”

“Well,” Brienne said, still whispering, “the situation seemed a bit beyond a packet of aspirin and five bandaids.”

The bear threw back its head and roared. Jaime spun and brandished the knife at it again.

The bear looked at them quizzically. Brienne’s heart hammered in her chest, which was pressed rather tight against Jaime’s sweaty back. She could feel him breathing, faster than even she was.

The bear grunted, grabbed the bag by its straps, and wandered away.

For a few moments—a few long moments, I’ll bet—they held their same position, and watched the bear’s furry hind end disappear over the emerald hills. Then Brienne more or less lifted Jaime clean off her legs, and kicked off the sweaty blanket, and stood up, much too fast. Jaime stabbed the knife in the ground, hard, and sat back against the rock.

“Fuck,” he said, closing his eyes. “We’re so fucked now.”

Brienne’s head was spinning, from heat, or thirst, or just plain anger. “I thought you were a soldier,” she snapped at him. “Surely you’ve overcome worse than this.”

He had. If only she’s known then how much he’d overcome. But, she didn’t, so his pride got him standing shakily to his feet again. He pulled the knife from the ground and shoved it into his pocket. He wasn’t going to die out here with her thinking him a whiny, soft coward.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, her voice full of that typical sureness.

They argued mightily then about which way to go. It’s absurd since there was only one way that made any sense—the one way that wasn’t back to the plane or following behind that bear. 

Eventually Brienne won the argument. She rolled up their blanket with her working arm and they headed off, Jaime grumbling again at her back. She regretted letting him hang on to the knife.

When they crested the next big hill, what they saw at the bottom of it knocked the despair right out of them. A forest, thick and knotty, waved languidly in a fresh breeze. And in front of it, winding around the base of the hill, glittering, beckoning—

“A river,” Brienne breathed.

“You sure?” Jaime squinted. He could see it, but he couldn’t hear it flowing.

Brienne charged down the hill, heedless of him. He cursed and followed her, his body throbbing with each step, just as hers surely did.

At the edge of the river, Brienne stumbled. She was close enough now that she saw her mistake. Her mind had conjured up a vision of what she’d been hoping to see. This was no river. It was hard, hot asphalt.

Jaime cackled as he skidded to a stop beside her. It was a cackle that spun out of control. “A road. A fucking road! We’re in the shit now, woman.”

I know Brienne well enough now that I know how red-faced she gets when she’s ashamed of something, even something stupid she’s got no business feeling shame for. I can picture the exact shade of crimson she turned in that moment. But bless her, she didn’t let it hold her back. She stood up and brushed the dirt from her hand and she looked Jaime square in his mocking eyes.

“We may have hoped for water, but a road’s still useful,” she said. “A road means people.”

“A road as empty as this one means fuck-all.” He had to say this to her back, though, because she was already shading her eyes and looking out ahead of them, weighing which way to go.

She took the left, on nothing but a hunch. She figured either way had to go somewhere. Jaime tailed her, automatically. He knew deep down he was in a bad way. If he was going to die, he wasn’t going to do it alone.

They hobbled down the road for some time, broken and thirsty and frayed. The wind cooled them a bit, but not enough. Out there in the open, the sun beat down on them, relentless. The weight of it all was so much, so overpowering, that they didn’t notice how they veered well into the lane. They didn’t notice a truck bearing down behind them.

But then: the truck swerved out the way to avoiding running them down. The driver spun around in front of them and came to a screeching stop in the middle of the road. He jumped out with the engine still running and the door still open and charged right toward them.

It must have given them a fright. The man had half his face burned off so his beard stopped partway across his chin. He was taller than them both and his build made it not so hard to think he could throw them both down if he had to. He would only do it if he really had to, though. Sandor was one of us; I knew him well by then. I know him even better now.

Upon seeing him, Jaime broke into the scary kind of hysterical laughter again. “Well fuck me,” he cackled, mirthless. “If it isn’t Mad Dog Clegane. I thought we were in the woods, not the looney bin. Or am I in the nuthouse too? That would explain a lot.”

“Fuck you too, Lannister,” Sandor said. “I’m surprised to see you walking around free. Last I heard the proper place for traitors was in a jail cell.”

Jaime stopped laughing then. “I’m no fucking traitor.”

“Please,” Brienne interrupted, “can you stop whatever this is? We could really use a ride to the nearest hospital, if you’d be so kind.” Brienne must have really looked like shit, then, her bone nearly poking out of her arm and both their blood all over her clothes, because Sandor turned his attention away from the sneering Jaime in front of him to look her up and down.

“Nearest hospital’s hours away,” he said. “But we’ve got healers in our camp. Help your woman get in, Lannister.”

“I’m not his woman, or anyone’s,” Brienne protested. She pushed Jaime into the truck and got herself in behind him. She threw their sad blanket at her feet. She wouldn’t pick it up again.

As they nestled all into the long front seat, Jaime was struggling with the middle seat seatbelt, a tough task even with two good hands. Why he was bothering with that shit at a time like this, I couldn’t even say. Delirium, most like. But that’s when Sandor first caught sight of his mangled wrist, wrapped in Brienne’s bloodstained shirt. “Fucking hell, Lannister,” Sandor said. “What the fuck happened to you?”

“I crashed our plane into a ravine back there,” he mumbled.

Sandor shook his head and reached across them to pop open the glove compartment. He pulled out the fifth of whiskey that he always had hid there and passed it to Brienne.

“You deserve a drink,” he said to her, “seeing as you’ve been stranded out here with the likes of him.” She was surprised, by him and by how he knew Jaime on sight, but she also was at the point where nothing could be surprising anymore. So she took it.

He turned the key in the ignition and drove off then, going faster than he’d usually do. He was getting worried about the state of them. Sandor acts all tough, all fuck-you and get-away, but deep down he’s got a real soft heart.

* * *

The camp that he mentioned belonged to the Brotherhood. I’d been living there for God-knows-how-many months with Brothers and Sisters and the Sisters who the Brothers took as wives to make into Ladies. Then there was all us assorted wards, underfoot. All my life, my sister Arya was the one they called underfoot, but there I was, being in the way instead without her, among a passel of strangers.

I remember the blazing morning when Sandor drove up with the two strangers in his front seat. We were a cluster of trailers, deep in the woods, with some rough-hewn pavilions for our communal eating and bathing and praying. Sandor was the first up; his job was driving his truck up to town for the Brothers, checking the post, buying feed for the chickens, that sort of thing. I woke early too. Sometimes he’d bring me coffee or little lemon cakes from the grocer and we’d sit in the empty prayer pavilion, mostly not speaking. He saw the lonesomeness in my face, just like I saw it on his.

That time, though, Sandor hadn’t even made it to town. He’d come upon them not even half of the ride in. I ran out to greet his truck, concerned that something bad was coming. The law. The townies. The improbable apocalypse. Brother Thoros had us all wound tight.

Brienne climbed out of the truck fastest. She was concerning herself with Jaime, whose head was lolling, beaded with sweat.

“Alayne,” Sandor called then, seeing me watching outside. He only knew my new name, not my true one. “Fetch Sister Jeyne. Quick.”

Sister Jeyne was our healer. We used to have two, but right before I came, Brother Beric hung himself far out in the Whispering Wood, and she was on her own. I took to her ‘cause she had the same name as my best friend back home. She took to me ‘cause she saw how my ma and Uncle Petyr were spending all their time clustered away with Brother Thoros, leaving me on my own. I worked alongside her, most days, mixing elixirs and cleaning things. I did as she bid and I made myself useful.

I banged on Jeyne’s trailer door. She got her own, so as to fit a sick bed on the other end. It was still the bright hours of the morning, still the hours of silence for all in the Brotherhood, and she came to the door in a thin robe, looking cross. But when I pointed at the newcomers, covered in blood just a few paces away, she rushed past to help. Sister Jeyne was always one of the good ones.

Inside Sister Jeyne’s quarters, I sat myself down on a stool out of the way. Soon Sandor came with Brienne, pulling a wobbly Jaime between them. He nodded at me as he left. Apologized for not bringing me my coffee that day, a ridiculous thing to say as an injured man he picked up instead sat delirious in front of us. I watched as Jeyne set to working on them. She cut their bloody clothes away, cleaned their skin and wounds, grabbed splints and bandages and honey salves, to keep infection at bay.

Finally, she noticed me hovering behind. “Alayne,” she ordered, for she didn’t know my true name, either, “take the jug to get us more water.” Her addressing me made Brienne take notice, too. Her face, pink with embarrassment at being made to sit there in just her bra, snapped up to see mine. She took a long, quizzical look, head tilted like one of our dogs when he heard a sound we couldn’t. I scampered outside before I could think on what it meant.

At the old well on the edge of our camp—the real reason we all posted up here in the first place—I pulled up a bucket of water and started to pour it through a funnel into Jeyne’s big plastic jug. I hated that task; I’d have to drag it along the ground all the way back. Across the way, folks came in and out of Brother Greenbeard’s trailer, mumbling and grousing even though quiet hours ran til lunch. No one spoke of what went on in there, only that we kids were to stay away. But I knew that whatever it was, it was no good: a man always sat out front with a rifle slung over his lap, rain or shine.

That morning, as I got to halfway full with the water jug, my own mother stumbled out the Greenbeards’ trailer and down the path toward me. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Ma there, and so her sloppy movements and blank face didn’t shock me. I nodded at her as she slowly passed, trying for a smile, and for a moment, her eyes slid to mine under the lank hair that hung round her face. They had no life in ‘em, her eyes. They never did at that point. Soon she passed me and her gaze was on the ground again.

I tried to put it out of my mind as I pulled the heavy water jug back to Jeyne’s place. I pulled it up the steps one at a time, til Brienne threw the door open to help me pull it up. She has one of Jeyne’s old tees on now, full of cigarette burns, and her arm was bound up in a sling underneath it. Still she was scary strong even with just her good arm, and she lifted the water the rest of the way inside. I was in awe of her then; she was like some warrior from legend, tall and strong and gleaming.

“You’re her,” she said as I stepped in the door. I hadn’t even had the chance to say thank you. “You’re Sansa Stark.”

I hadn’t heard that name from anyone’s lips in some time. I thought that soon I would forget it had ever been my name altogether.

“Everyone is looking for you,” she continued, undaunted by my staring. “Your older brother and your sister—they’ve been holding press conferences, showing your picture to the whole country. The whole world, even.”

 _My big brother is dead_ , I wanted to say, though I knew who she meant.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said instead. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

I turned and ran, then. Out the door and down the short stack of stairs and into the woods, as fast as my little legs could carry me.

* * *

I’ve been giving you the impression that Brienne and Jaime are my closest of friends all this time, so it probably doesn’t make much sense to you that I’d flee from them so quick. That’s true now, going on four years later, but back then, I wouldn’t have trusted even God himself if He walked up and said He was there to save me.

Life with the Brotherhood kept you paranoid, even if you weren’t a diehard like Ma. Brother Thoros took up most of his twice-plus-daily sermons talking how the law was coming to take us away because we knew the truth. He wore dark sunglasses all the time, even when it was the nighttime prayer, and he’d taken to calling himself Azor Ahai, the Lightbringer. He’d say that we needed to get ready for the world to become eternal winter; that he would warm us in the fires of his faith.

Daddy used to always say that winter was coming, but he didn’t mean this—he meant it like we should always be grateful for the plenty we have, because hard times could always come. I came to suspect that Brother Thoros was spending most his time sampling whatever Brother Greenbeard was peddling and not thinking much about savoring what good we had at all. But still, though I knew what he was saying was off-the-wall crazy, it was hard not to let the fevered tones of his voice burrow into my chest and set my heart racing.

Ma and Uncle Petyr—Lady Stone and Brother Stone, then—snuggled right up to the leader as soon as we got there. Ma stood on stage with him sometimes as he ranted, bringing him water and leading the amens in the call and response. Uncle Petyr got close in other ways. He was always one to be behind the scenes, sneaking around. Brother Thoros had internet in his trailer—the only one of us who did—and his video sermons were what brought us all together. Petyr convinced him that he should be the one handling that daily business, along with the petty administrative work that kept the place float. Uploading videos, purchasing food, selling Brother Greenbeard’s wares—that was earthly business that only distracted Brother Thoros from what he needed to do to be the Lightbringer.

Brother Thoros went along with it. A very convincing man, Uncle Petyr was. I’d bet almost anything he was behind getting Brother Thoros all hopped up on whatever uppers it was that the Greenbeards made. If he didn’t take him out to the trailer himself, I could just as easily see him convincing Lady Greenbeard in the kitchens to slip something into his supper, saying he needed it to stay awake to pray. Uncle Petyr would do anything to be on top, no matter what it was that he ended up on top of.

With Brother Stone pulling the strings, things were changing very fast in the camp. I’d only been there a handful of months and even I could see it. The kids I bunked with had been there longer, and they noticed it more. Sister Melly, a girl of only seven, dragged her feet when it came time for prayer meeting. “I ain’t itching to go,” she’d say, frowning. Her little brother, a mite of only four, cried when Brother Tom played the new songs at mealtimes; they were slow and eerie, all dark notes, and I couldn’t blame little Brother Mycah in the slightest for disliking them.

The only girl near my age, Myranda, was a different story. Sister Myranda seemed to grow stronger and happier the more things spun out of control. At the time I thought it was just because she was six and ten and more worldly than I. Now I know different. She was just lost in her own way.

One night she grabbed my hand and pulled me close. “Don’t tell anyone,” she whispered, like I had a wide circle of friends there to go blabbing to, “but I’ve got the best news. Brother Thoros has chosen me for his wife. I’m to be Lady Myr soon.”

“Congrats,” I whispered back, though I didn’t feel any cheer. I couldn’t imagine taking sweaty Brother Thoros and his sunglasses into my marriage bed with such enthusiasm.

“He said you’d be a Lady soon, too. He’s had a few offers for you. Brother Stone has asked him if he can take you on as his second. We don’t really do that here, but he said he’d pray on it. Maybe we’ll have a wedding together, you and I. Won’t that be grand?”

I squeezed her hand and told her I was tired. I didn’t sleep, though. How could I? Uncle Petyr always said I reminded him of Ma when she was young. I took it as a compliment, before; everyone said Ma had been fierce and beautiful. By then, though, she was nothing but a shell of a person. Petyr burned through her and he was looking to start all over again at the beginning with a fresh wick.

That night was just a few before my heroes showed up. Things changed even faster once they got there. I never got to see if Myranda got her wedding. I don’t know if I wish to know if she had. But you see how I had a hard time trusting anyone to look out for me, especially strangers. Even Sandor and Jeyne, bless them, didn’t get too close. So I ran, that day.

I couldn’t run forever, of course. The camp was only so big. And I couldn’t bear to let Sister Jeyne down when she came and asked me to help her care for them, either. I found myself under that piercing blue gaze of Brienne’s again, and again, and again.

She saw me. She knew me. With each glance, she was plotting to save me. It terrified me, then. Now it brings me to tears.

* * *

Within two hours, the entire camp knew we had visitors. It was supposed to be quiet hours, but humans aren’t meant to keep quiet in such times, with change and danger on the winds.

Brother Thoros came by first, his red hair matted into a knot at the top of his head, dark sunglasses sliding on his greasy face. He smiled his gap-toothed, metal-studded smile.

“I hear the Lord dropped you from the sky into our laps,” he said, by way of greeting. “My flock welcomes you.” Jaime snorted, then yelped as Brienne elbowed him in the ribs.

“Thank you,” she said, pleasantly. You’d never know she’d had her broken arm painfully wrenched into place just minutes earlier. “We are grateful for your hospitality.”

Brother Thoros knelt down in front of them on the sickbed. He placed one hand on each knee and began to pray. Probably it was a real crazy prayer, too, full of winter warnings and flaming swords and him leading us out of the darkness. Brienne played serious and went along with it. Jaime, well—there was no chance with Jaime. He burst out into laughter almost immediately, doubling over.

Brienne turned red, I’m sure of it. “You’ll have to excuse my...my companion here. He’s quite ill. Delirious, from the injury.” She pointed at his bandaged wrist with her head. Brother Thoros finished his prayer quickly, Jaime still laughing all the while in the background

Delirium maybe was part of it, but all the fever and the shock of blood loss did was remove the thin layer between Jaime’s thoughts and his mouth. When Jeyne and I came back in, Jeyne toting fresh clothes for Jaime begged off one of the Brothers, he welcomed her by calling loudly, “Look, Brienne—the witch is back!”

“Sorry,” Brienne said, still rosy in the face from their encounter with Brother Thoros.

Jeyne just threw her head back and laughed. “Haven’t heard that one for a while.” She tossed Jaime the clothes: a neon-yellow beer company shirt and marijuana-patterned swim trunks that both belonged to a much fatter man. Me, she bustled behind the half-walled kitchenette so as to shield my eyes. I busied myself pouring out two glasses of Jeyne’s chilled anti-inflammatory tea while Brienne tried to wrestle Jaime out of his bloodstained jeans.

“First the belt, now this,” he said. “Feisty.”

“Will you just shut the hell up?” she hissed.

Jeyne chuckled and patted me on the back, and then she abandoned me with them to go pick some herbs outside. It was always sink or swim with Jeyne.

I mixed a whole other pitcher of tea we didn’t need until they quieted down some. Then I walked out toward them, a glass in each hand.

“It’s for the pain,” I explained. Brienne nodded dutifully and took a sip.

Jaime spit out his first gulp. “What is this, perfume?” It was tumeric-lavender tea, mixed with oil of bergamot, so in truth, he was not far off.

“How did you come to be here, Sansa?” Brienne asked in a soft voice, ignoring him. She was so sure. “Are you safe?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“My name is Alayne,” I whispered.

They could have left then, fed and watered and cleaned up. They’d have had enough energy to get themselves to the nearest hospital, treat their wounds with something other than vodka and cool cloths and honey ginger salve. Instead, Brienne and Jaime took their evening meal in Jeyne’s trailer and spent the night on the narrow sickbed on the far end where they’d sat all day.

Brienne says they stayed because she thought it would be less painful to travel with Jaime after he got some rest. Jaime jokes that Brienne pushed for it because she liked the idea of sharing that small bed with him, especially when he had to shed his shirt to stay cool in the stuffy trailer. We all laugh.

I just knew I couldn't leave you there, Brienne says. You looked so lost.

* * *

I hadn’t seen Uncle Petyr outside of prayertime since Sister Myranda blurted out what he wanted from me in the night. But on Jaime and Brienne’s second morning in the camp, he walked out of Jeyne’s trailer as I was coming toward it. He was at the back of a small crowd: silver-haired Jeyne; sneering, stumbling Jaime, in his lurid mismatched gear; bleary-eyed Brienne. He nodded to me as I approached. Brienne said all the color in my face drained away soon as I saw him.

I felt Brienne watching me as I caught Jeyne’s eye, determined to avoid Petyr’s smug beady stare. “Everything’s ready,” I told her.

“You go on back,” she said, patting me on the arm. “Show our guests how it all works.” She took Petyr by the elbow and steered him toward the mess hall, not looking back once.

Jeyne was one of the good ones.

The plan was to sweat the toxins from their blood. Jeyne swore that it helped any ailment. I don’t know where Jeyne came up with any of her knowledge. Brother Beric built what he called his sweat lodge long before, in the early days of the Brotherhood, a ramshackle thing made of plywood and PVC pipes, and she was set to make good use of it. Saunas are why those Scandinavians live so long and age so well, she’d say.

Jaime didn’t much like the idea. “The only toxins I need to get rid of are the ones in that perfume the witch has been making me drink,” he grumbled. _The witch had also cleaned and stitched up your wound, and was singlehandedly the reason you didn’t die out there in the Riverlands_ , I recall thinking at the time.

Brienne, for her part, just rolled her eyes and pushed him forward to follow me. Brienne was skeptical of the idea, too, but she didn’t want to rock the boat. Jaime was looking slightly better and playing along would get her more time to think out what to do about me.

You had to shower before you could use the sauna. It didn’t make much sense to me, seeing as you were just gonna get all sweaty, but you didn’t disagree with Jeyne on these things. We showered outside in the Brotherhood, in little cubicles made up of plastic pipes with moldy vinyl curtains hanging between. The water pumped straight out of the hose onto you and was always freezing cold. I hated it; even in the summer heat it was an awful shock.

Brienne slipped into Jaime’s stall with him unprompted, pulling off his shirt over his head quickly and professionally. She’s been woken in the night by him struggling to take it off in the heat and had little patience for listening to him bellyaching about it again. “Finally, some foreplay,” he laughed.

“I trust you can manage the rest yourself.” She tore the curtain back and stomped out to where I stood.

“Can you?” I asked her.

  
“Take off the rest of his clothes?” Behind her I heard him turn the knob for the water and curse as it spluttered down.

“No,” I said, gesturing to her bandages and arm sling. “Take off your own.”

“Oh.” She looked down. She had thought to roll the sleeves of Jeyne’s old shirt into a tank, freeing her arms to wear it normally. It must have taken ages to maneuver into. “I suppose. It might take me a minute.”

I ushered her into the stall, businesslike, the way she had just done with Jaime. “It’s easier with two hands,” I said, easing her top over her head.

“Are we taking showers or just making a weird porno over here?” Jaime called over the wall.

“Don’t mind him,” Brienne said. “Thank you for your help.”

I unfastened the sling to slide her shirt down the other arm. She didn’t even flinch though it must have hurt. “Is he your boyfriend?”

She sighed. “This was our second date.”

A giggle escaped my lips. I couldn’t help it. “So how’s it going?”

She smiled a little too and rolled her eyes. Then she tilted her head at me, looking down at me all serious. “He’s on the news, too,” she whispered. “The one who calls himself Brother Stone. They say he murdered your au—“

I held up my hand to stop her, shaking my head. He had eyes everywhere. I hung her shirt over the rail next to Jaime’s clothes and turned to go. “Try not to get the plaster wet.”

A second later, her water ran too. She didn’t say anything more.

* * *

The sauna was only a few paces away from the showers, though I felt real bad making them walk it barefoot and drenched, wearing only the sad excuses for towels that Jeyne kept on hand to cover up their private bits.

I folded their clothes on the bench out front and opened the door. A gust of hot air puffed out. It made my eyes water.

“After you, my lady,” Jaime said. Brienne sighed heavy again like she had back at the showers.

Once they seated themselves inside I peeked my head around the door jamb. “See you in forty minutes. Shout if you need something.”

“Forty?!” I heard Jaime exclaim as I pulled the door shut.

Normally when I took folks to the saunas for Jeyne, I sat on the bench outside to wait for them, feeling real bored. They were usually alone, maybe grunting or shifting around, in there, and nothing much happened. I passed the time watching Brothers go back and forth through the woods, collecting water, traipsing out to Brother Greenbeard’s trailer. I settled back against the wall and stared out ahead at the trees.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I heard Brienne say through the wall. “Cover yourself back up.”

“Well, it’s fucking hot in here,” Jaime said.

Listen, I was still a girl of four and ten, despite it all. I felt my face get hot and I had to cover my mouth to keep a laugh from coming out. I should not have turned my ear to the wall to hear the rest, but like I said, usually this job was real boring.

“Really, you should be thanking me. I’m giving you some visuals to use in forgetting that fellow you signed up for the app to forget. Who was he, anyway?”

“None of your business.”

“I’m letting you see all my business. The least you could do is share your own.”

She sighed again. She was trapped in there, after all. “My ski instructor.”

“Interesting. You know, I was invited to a ski instructor’s wedding not too long ago. His brother is married to my stepsister. I skipped it. I hate those society things. But surely he’s not the one. He was marrying a man.”

Silence. Then laughter. Jaime’s.

“Oh God,” he said. “You honestly thought he was heterosexual?”

“No—that’s—it’s not a laughing matter.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. He always seemed like a nice guy. Dependable. Hardworking. I can see how that would be attractive. And we can’t choose who we love.”

“No,” she said, so quietly I had to strain to hear.

“So what about you?” she asked, after a short silence. “What were you doing to make your brother so miserable he wanted to foist you off on some unsuspecting woman?”

“Pining for someone unavailable. Same as you. Do you really not know? It was trending all the fuck over the internet during my brother-in-law’s election. Would’ve got further if my father didn’t own most of the media.”

“I train. I sleep. I compete. I don’t have time to tweet or pay attention to gossip.”

“You’re my dream woman.”

I could picture Brienne rolling her eyes.

“So who was she? Or he? Your brother-in-law?” _It would be just my luck to match with another handsome gay man_ , she thought.

He guffawed. “Even if I swung that way, I’d have better taste than Bobby Baratheon.”

“So who?”

He sighed. “If you must know—my stepsister. I’ve had eyes only for her since I was twelve years old and she moved into my house. Are you shocked?”

She remembered the _#Lannicest_ articles from earlier. Her concerns for Jaime’s privacy. A lifetime ago. And he clearly had some different notions about privacy that she did, that’s for damn sure. “At this point I think there’s little you can do to shock me.”

“I used to think it would work out. It’s not like she’s my actual sister. It’s not against the law of gods or men. People would have mocked us, but I didn’t care. I loved her.”

“But she didn’t have eyes for you.”

“Oh, she did. Ever since the beginning. Just not for me only. Since I got back from Qarth, she kept leaving her husband’s bed in the middle of the night to come to mine, but never staying. I’ve been living with my brother these past few months. I suppose he was getting fed up with it all.”

“How long have you been back?” Brienne now wanted desperately to talk of something else.

“Six months. I’d rather be there still.”

“So why aren’t you?”

Jaime chuckled. “Not my choice.”

“Does it have anything to do with why that man said you should be in jail?”

He looked furious as soon as she said it. “You really are going for the jugular, woman. They should hire you to interrogate prisoners out in the Red Waste.”

She felt a little bad, poking at another wound of his, but she hadn’t forgotten the anger and loathing in Sandor’s voice when he picked them up. She had cared for him, kept him from dying, but she still wondered what kind of man she was really stuck here with.

“Clegane doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he finally said. My heart raced a bit when I heard his name come up. I hadn’t known about their connection.

“He seemed very sure that he did.”

“Yeah, well, after he got his face burned off, he ran off base into the desert to die, and my men and I almost died ourselves trying to find him and bring him back. So I wouldn’t put too much stock in what Mad Dog thinks is the right way of things.”

“So he just calls you a traitor because he’s annoyed you didn’t let him die. That makes perfect sense.”

Jaime’s head hit the wall with a loud thunk. _This woman won’t be satisfied until she rends me wide open in this tiny hot room_ , he thought. And even then, she’d think him a traitor and a coward and worse, like the others. And he couldn’t have that.

“I’m no traitor.”

“Okay.”

He took a deep breath. “Our commander was a real piece of work. At first I thought it was just run-of-the-mill power-drunkenness. Being nasty to the new arrivals for no reason. Sending the men he didn’t like out on the most dangerous patrols. He specially requested me out of the air division to come run supply logistics on the base, but then sent me out driving around whenever he felt like it. Driving in Qarth is one of the most dangerous things you could do, because of the roadside bombs. He was a Targaryen; his father was president and his grandfather was president and so he could do whatever he wanted. My dad’s news channels said bad things about his family, so he plucked me up and messed around with me, because he could.

“But then I was with him on a prisoner transport one night. I didn’t understand why he stooped to come along. He grabbed one of the women in the group and took her in the back of the truck and had his way with her. She was screaming in her language, fighting back. Finally he took out his gun and just shot her in the head.”

“My God,” Brienne said.

“The other men barely reacted. I urged them to go back there and intervene. But they had seen it before from him, it turns out. I tried to file a complaint against him but the sergeant in charge of that told me not to bother unless I wanted to not come back from my next delivery run. So I said nothing. Did my job. Put in a request to be sent back to the air unit, but they denied it. They needed me running logistics at the base. Or so they said. He really could get away with anything.

“One day I was driving with a caravan escorting visiting politicians. Fucking stupid idea for me to even go. Up ahead there was disturbance on the road. Telltale sign that there was danger. A private riding with me told me to radio ahead to the commander, driving the armored truck. It was just him and his lapdog second-in-command up there. I had my hand on the radio but I didn’t do it. I slammed on the breaks and let them go on ahead. A few second later their truck went up in flames. I suppose I could have stopped it. But he needed to be stopped.

“They all named me traitor after that. I had a court-martial and everything. They were ready to convict me. Send me to jail or worse. It was the girl’s father who convinced them otherwise. Ned Stark. He was high up out there. He got me a discharge instead. Still looked at me like I was trash even when he was doing me that act of mercy. My father hushed up all the coverage back home. It basically never happened. And everyone who calls me a traitor, out in the Red Waste, they don’t know what a favor I did them.”

He stood then, slammed his fist on the wall. “I need to get out of here.” Then there was a great shaking crash. The sound of a man falling clean over onto the floor. I was frozen still. _It was the girl’s father who convinced them otherwise_ , he’d said.

“Jaime! Are you all right?”

I snapped out of it. Scrambled to my feet and wrenched the door open. Brienne was crouched on the floor, her towel fallen to the floor behind her. She held Jaime on her lap, cradling his head in her arms. I can’t believe it took me passing out for you to get naked, he says, every time.

She looked up at me, eyes troubled and pleading. “Go get some help,” she near shouted. “He needs some help.”

For the second time, because of Brienne, I went running.

* * *

Don’t worry—Jaime was fine. It turns out that if you’re dehydrated, but refuse to drink most of the liquids given to you because “they taste like poison,” and then go into a steaming hot sauna, you’re likely to pass out. A little fresh air and some plain water when he woke up was all he needed.

I, on the other hand, was not fine. I could understand why Sandor never talked about his face, or what his life was like before the Brotherhood. We all had things we kept quiet. But Sandor never said he knew that guy. Never said that there was a murderer that he just let sit around our camp. He never said he knew my father. I mean, he didn’t know to say, probably, but maybe he did.

It rained in the night and so that next morning was a clammy one. I sat on the damp bench on the edge of the prayer pavilion, my knees hugged to my chest, and smelled the wet dirt in the air. Birds twittered as they hopped from tree to tree; in the distance, Lady Greenbeard banged pots and pans in her kitchen, getting breakfast started for the whole Brotherhood. If I hadn’t been on edge, it would’ve been peaceful.

I watched Sandor pull up in his dirty old black truck, stones crunching under his tires. Watched him step out, slam the door closed behind him, lumber over with his heavy steps like everything was normal. “They were out of those lemon things you like,” he said, passing me a cardboard coffee cup with a plastic-wrapped muffin perched on top. Three creams, one sugar, because that was my order, always.

I took it from him without a word.

He huffed and sat down beside me. “What’s up with you?”

I shook my head and took a sip of the coffee.

“You never said you knew him. Jaime.”

“No one asked.”

“You should have said.”

“Listen, there’s nothing to tell. We were in the army together. But barely. I got out less than two months after he got transferred to our unit.”

“He killed someone. Two people. I heard him say. He’s dangerous. You shouldn’t have kept it a secret.”

He snorted. “He can’t do a whole lot of damage in his current condition. Aside from being an annoying cunt. He’ll be out of our hair soon enough.”

I played with the spout on the coffee lid. Pushed it down, pulled it up. Down, up. Down. Up. “Did you know Ned Stark? In the army.”

“Sure. Everyone at the base in Qarth did. Shame what happened to him and his kid. He was a good guy.”

I turned and looked him straight in the eye. “My name isn’t Alayne. It’s Sansa. Ned’s my father. Was.”

He gave me a blank look. He’d been with the Brotherhood a whole year. He didn’t know that I’d just admitted to being a missing person. To being in danger.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” I said. “Uncle Petyr says it’s supposed to be a secret.”

He nodded, slow, holding my gaze in his. I felt small under it. “Your secret’s safe with me, little bird.”

* * *

The midday prayer that day seemed to go on forever. Brother Thoros spoke on the theme of the wind: powerful, wild, ever-present. “Like the Lord,” he said, shaking his fist at the sky. “We are at the mercy of the wind, but never is it at the mercy of us.”

Frankly, I didn’t know what in the hell he was on about. There was no breeze at all during that meeting. Maybe he woke to a gust in the night and came away inspired. But everyone in the audience was nodding. They always did.

In the front row, Ma raised her hands to the sky, like she was reaching out to grab hold of Thoros up there on the platform. “Mercy,” she cried out, her voice throaty and ragged. Her tangled hair swayed down her back. A few paces from her, Uncle Petyr stood rigid and self-assured. I had to look away.

When the service finally ended, I caught sight of Brienne, standing at the edge of the crowd. She was already watching me, unceasing. Jaime wasn’t with her; after his reaction to Brother Thoros earlier, she had decided to leave him behind.

She started walking toward me, long purposeful strides, like she wasn’t even injured. I jumped back, bumping hard into a man’s chest. He put his hands on my shoulders, holding me in place. “Careful there, little bird.”

It wasn’t spiritual yearning that Brienne had sought here. It wasn’t even me. It was Sandor.

“Hello, Mr. Clegane,” Brienne said. “I was hoping we could have a word.”

“Looks like we’re having it,” he replied.

“Well. Yes. My—friend and I are doing much better, and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I was hoping you could give us a ride to town. We’ve imposed upon your hospitality here long enough.”

Sandor snorted. “Your friend? I hear you took a pretty steamy turn in the sauna together yesterday.”

Brienne’s face turned a light shade of pink. “It’s a sauna. Steam is the whole point.”

“Sandor goes to town every morning,” I piped up. “He’s just being difficult. He’ll take you.”

“Maybe I should make you take them now, if you’re so keen on it,” he mumbled.

“That’s absurd,” Brienne said. “She’s hardly old enough to drive.”

Sandor hadn’t really thought about my age before. Sad girls never look their age. He patted my shoulders once more and then dropped his hands.

“Fine. Tomorrow at dawn. I’ll take you.” He turned and walked away.

Brienne grabbed my shoulders then. “Come with us,” she said softly. “You can’t be happy here.”

I was tired of being grabbed. I pulled back. She swallowed, her eyes casting to the ground.

“I’m always up then, anyways,” I said. It wasn’t an out-loud promise, or an on-purpose one, even. But it was one, nonetheless. Brienne looked up and nodded, a small smile on her face.

“I suppose I will see you in the morning, then,” she said.

That night I lay awake restless. Myranda kicked up at my bunk to get me to stop turning. I told myself it was the heat, the lack of breeze, but there was no heat and there was plenty of breeze coming through our screens. The night my sister took my little brothers and ran, I lay awake too, wondering if I had done the right thing by staying behind, telling myself it was something else keeping me awake. I wouldn’t make that same mistake again. I knew why I was awake. I knew I had to leave.

It must have been close to one in the morning when the shouts started. Brienne started the whole chain reaction. She got up in the night to take a piss, but Jeyne’s bathroom was occupied, by Jeyne. So she went outside, squatted down out behind the trailer; she camped enough as a kid so as not to be shy about it.

Unlucky for her, a trailer over, four or five of the Brothers were sitting outside around a dwindling bonfire. Drinking beer, smoking something stronger than cigarettes, getting up to no good. They heard Brienne coming and jumped to attention, swaggering over. They were bored and jacked up and spoiling for a fight. And when they saw they dealt with a woman, well. They got some different ideas.

Brienne punched and kicked. She broke a nose and set another guy wheezing. But there were more of them than her, and only the light of the moon to see by. She ended up flat on her back, crashing to the ground with a great yell.

“Get your hands off her, or I’ll shoot.” She looked up behind her and saw Jaime standing there in his stupid neon swim trunks, holding a rifle in his unsteady left hand. The rifle belonged to Jeyne; it normally rested just inside the door. He’d clocked it as soon as he set foot in the trailer; you can take a man out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the man.

The Brothers that held Brienne jumped back. No fight was worth a bullet in the head, and Jaime looked deadly in the moonlight. Thank fuck they did, he says now; I wasn’t sure at all that I could shoot straight with my off hand.

When they all had fled back to their bonfire, Jaime shifted the gun into his other arm and offered Brienne his hand to help her stand up. He took in the dirt on her face, a cut on her cheek; it would leave a scar.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She didn’t let go of his hand all the way back to the trailer. Not even when they climbed back into their shared bed. They clung together then, her back to his chest, curled up—little pretense or sarcasm left between them. If I had to say, just as an observer: that was the beginning of things getting serious between them.

That would be sweet if that were the end of it. But it wasn’t.

* * *

I drifted off to sleep, eventually, despite the shouting. Not for long, though. Someone came round in the dead quiet of the night, banging metal on metal. A serving spoon on a cast-iron pot.

“Everyone up!” Lady Greenbeard shouted into the dark.

Myranda jumped to her feet. She reached up to grab hold of my mattress and shake it. As I climbed down, slipping my feet into my shoes, wiping sleep from my eyes, she pulled the covers back from Melly and her little brother.

We all stumbled out into the camp. We weren’t alone: everyone was crawling out of their covers, too. The entire camp at attention.

The crowd moved as if it had its own mind into the prayer pavilion. Brother Thoros sat on the stage, a bright electric light above him beset with tiny fluttering white moths and clouds of gnats. He still had those goddamn sunglasses on. Underneath, his eyes glared at us all.

He wasn’t alone. Tied around the middle with coarse rope, back to back, sitting on the floor next to him, were Jaime and Brienne.

You see, one of those Brothers at the fire didn’t go licking his wounds back to his beer. He went off in search of Brother Stone, who told him to come to him if he saw anything strange with those outsiders staying with Jeyne. And finally, he had some information. He wasn’t fond of having guns pointed at him in his own camp.

Thoros grabbed a microphone from the stage floor. “Brothers and Sisters,” he barked. “An important time is upon us.”

A few people clapped, whistled, cheered. He silenced them with a flat palm raised in the air.

“I have been predicting this night would come,” he said. “In our midst: spies. Dropped from the sky. Do you know why? Because we are special. And they know that. They have been watching us. Watching our every move. Because we have learned the truth. About them. About the inner workings of mankind. About what is to come.”

He leapt to his feet.

“The government. The law. They have us in their sights. And now it’s a matter of time before they come for us. But I prayed on it. And _Lady Stone_ prayed on it. And _Brother Stone_ prayed on it. And we, Brothers and Sisters—we know what we need to do.”

He was pacing the stage.

“We will not give them the satisfaction of defeating us. We will not give in. We will not let them send in spies and just take us. Not against our will. _Ladies_.”

From the edges of the crowd, Lady Greenbeard and some of the sisters who worked in the kitchen with her sprung to life. They wove among the crowd, all the rest of us stock-still. Each held a box and they passed something out of it into each person’s palm. When Sister Sharna reached me, she smiled real warm and grasped my hand tight.

In it, she had placed a small, round, white pill.

I felt like I plunged into a frozen lake, quick and without warning. I felt like I stumbled across a patch of dark ice on our long driveway, my palms scraping along the asphalt. I felt like I tumbled into a deep snowdrift, struggling for breath, alone.

“Do you believe?” Thoros asked us.

A murmur rippled through the crowd.

“I asked you: do you believe?”

The cheers grew bolder.

“Do you believe that I am here to lead you? That I know the truth of our Lord? That I am Azor Ahai, born again, to protect you, my flock? Do you?”

Around me, everyone clapped and hollered. I just looked them over, still numb with cold. Sandor turned back, caught my eye. There was no celebration in his eyes, either. 

“If you believe,” Thoros said, “then follow me. Take that pill and follow me into safety from those who seek to cast us down. Follow me into the arms of the Lord.”

Some folks popped that pill into their mouths with no hesitation. Others took a deep breath, tears running down their cheeks, and swallowed it solemnly. Myranda had her arms around the two little kids. “Just like candy,” she said brightly, rubbing their backs.

Ma climbed the stairs onto the stage, two at a time. She approached the two prisoners from behind and they turned their faces to her. She grabbed Brienne by the face, a single hand gripping both cheeks, and shoved a pill into her mouth.

“Swallow,” Ma said, her voice a low raspy growl. Tears ran down Brienne’s face. Ma’s hand gripped her face tighter.

“One way or another, you die here. Another way might not be so quiet. I’ll make you shoot your boyfriend here right on the stage.”

Brienne swallowed.

When Ma turned to face Jaime, he just flashed a nasty smile. “No need to manhandle me, my lady,” he said. He opened his mouth wide for the pill, and stuck his tongue out for her to prove it was gone.

Ma grinned. On her thin bony face it was more a grimace. As she crossed the stage and headed back into the crowd, I saw Jaime reach for Brienne’s hand under the ropes, lock his fingers with hers.

I looked down at the pill in my hand and closed my fingers over it. Already I felt it leave chalky residue on my sweaty palm.

 _I am not dying for these crazy motherfuckers_ , I thought.

“You feel it, Brothers?” Thoros boomed. “You feel it, Sisters?”

More people were crying. Lady Dennett crumpled to her knees. Brienne squeezed Jaime’s hand.

“What you feel is your _devotion_. The truth is—there ain’t nothing but sugar in those pills we gave you.”

Jaime barked out a laugh, shaking his head. Others in the crowd laughed too, desperate, gasping laughs, shot through with tears.

I dropped the pill to the ground and crushed it under my foot.

“The Lord didn’t tell me to kill you tonight. No, sir. The Lord wanted me to _prepare_ you. Because the law is gonna bring darkness upon us. It’s gonna bring a winter upon us the likes of which we’ve _never_ seen. And we won’t let them and their spies take us. Together, the Brotherhood will come out victorious.”

He jumped to his feet.

“Return to your beds, Brothers and Sisters. You’ll need your rest, believe you me.”

We all dispersed, back the way we came, a rumble of relief and joy and determination in the air. Lem and Harwin, Thoros’s favorite goons, came up on stage, jerked Jaime and Brienne to their feet, and hauled them away.

Back in our trailer, as the noise outside trailed off, Melly and Mycah curled up together in one bed, sniffling. In the bunk below mine, Myranda sighed. “I sure hope the government doesn’t ruin my wedding.”

I closed my eyes and hoped for morning.

* * *

On the other side of the camp, among a patch of tall trees, Jaime and Brienne were left to sleep sitting up, lashed to the trunk of an old maple.

The Brothers didn’t send their alleged spies to bed alone. After Lem and Harwin finished tying them up, the man Brother Thoros chose to guard them lumbered over to take his shift.

“You’re in the shit now, Lannister,” Sandor said, standing over him. He had a loaded rifle in one hand, muzzle face down in the dirt.

“How is it that you’ve fallen in with people who are more batshit than you?” Jaime laughed.

Sandor bent down. “In a couple of hours all these whackjobs are going to fall asleep. And then we’re getting the fuck out of here. Me, you, your woman. And the girl.”

Brienne had only been half-listening. She was looking around, trying to formulate her own plan of escape. Maybe she could feign illness and grab Clegane’s gun when he came over. Kill him, free Jaime, run. Put miles of trees between them and this bloodthirsty band of brothers.

But she turned her full attention to the men when they mentioned the girl.

“Sansa?” she asked. “The one calling herself Alayne.”

“That’s the one. We just have to wait.”

Sandor says that he must have told Jaime to shut the fuck up a hundred times during those two hours. He had to piss. The ropes were too tight. “Just take a fucking nap, Lannister,” he sighed at one point. He wished he could take a nap, that’s for sure. The crickets in the grass would have lulled him asleep any other night.

Jeyne woke me just before dawn by rapping on the door and calling my name, softly. I was still awake. I wonder if she guessed that I would be. When I opened the door for her, Myranda sat up sleepily, squinted at us, then collapsed back down into her bed.

“I need your help with something,” she whispered. I nodded and started to put my shoes back on.

She stepped inside and pulled my zip-up sweatshirt off its hook by the door. “Take this,” she said, handing it to me. “It got chilly out.”

It hadn’t, but I always did what Jeyne bid me. I followed her out into the dark and empty camp in my sleep shorts and tank top, sweatshirt dangling loose on my arm.

She didn’t take me to her trailer, or over to the prisoners, like I expected. Instead she led me into the windowless mechanic’s shed, next to where Sandor always parked.

Inside the only light came from a candle on the workbench. Brother Gendry, the mechanic, stood huddled with three tall folks, looking down at something against the wall.

“Got her,” Jeyne announced.

They all turned. Sandor. Jaime. Brienne.

“Well, let’s go,” Jaime said.

Jeyne handed me a bundle from the table. Inside I could hear glass jars clink against one another. “Take this. Some tea and the honey salve. In case you need it.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Away,” Sandor said. “This shit’s only going to get worse.”

“Will you come?” Brienne asked again.

I nodded.

We filed out silently to Sandor’s truck. He unlocked the passenger door for me and Jeyne helped me up into the seat.

She wrapped her bony arms around me tight, patting my back, and then she was gone.

In the back, Gendry and Sandor were busy loading up the truck bed. A bunch of automatic rifles, a flamethrower, several boxes of high-impact bullets, all tucked under a thick sheet of canvas. “I can’t believe Thoros got all this shit off the internet,” Sandor had muttered back in the shed while Jeyne was off fetching me. This way, they reckoned, he wouldn’t be able to use it and harm anyone for real.

Jaime and Brienne climbed in last, laying down next to the hidden arsenal in the truck bed. Sandor draped Brienne’s old blanket over them. No good in drawing more attention. As the engine started, they opened their eyes, took in each others’ faces, not more than a breath’s distance between them.

Sandor hopped in next to me, clicking his door softly closed. He reached across to check my lock.

He turned his key and the truck spluttered to life.

We backed out of his parking space, agonizingly slow. Sandor spun the truck around and started down the makeshift dirt road out of the camp. I looked back at the camp in the side mirror behind me, at the messy rows of dusty trailers, bathed in rosy morning light.

A man stepped into my view. There was no mistaking him: he wore the same hard calculating look on his creepy face that he’d worn ever since we showed up at his house in the mountains. Uncle Petyr thought he had me fooled, that he kept that part of himself well hid, but I always saw him for who he was.

“Sandor,” I said, my voice rising, “floor it.”

He saw Petyr too, so he didn’t need much in the way of prodding. We about flew the rest of the way to the main road. Poor Brienne and Jaime, having to jostle in the back. I hadn’t had the time to think of that.

Free of the trees, cruising on real pavement, Sandor started to slow down. “Sorry,” he said, “but I’m fucked if I get pulled over and the cops find me with a missing girl and a truckful of illegal weapons.”

We made it around a few bends in the road, curtains of green whipping past on both sides, when the truck started to slow down even more. It shuddered.

“Fuck.” Sandor pounded his fist on the steering wheel. He guided the car to the side of the road and cranked it forcefully to a stop.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Stay here,” he instructed. Out the window, I saw him point at Jaime, whose head had poked out from under the blanket, and say presumably the same thing.

He propped open the front hood of the car, the black pane of it obscuring my view. I watched the road from the rearview mirror instead.

On the horizon behind us, a pale car, low to the ground, crept into view. This is a road, I reminded myself, trying to get calm. Cars are gonna be on it.

The car drew nearer, and then sidled off the road onto the shoulder behind us. And then I was back in the ice and snow of my childhood.

I knew that car.

In the mirror I saw the doors open and the folks inside get out. Two fat men with mean faces. And then her.

Ma looked small next to Brother Lem and Brother Harwin. She was thin and pale and hunched over, and her neglected long hair just made her look even shorter. But there was no denying that she was the leader of this group. Her angry eyes said it. So did the rifle in her hand.

I unbuckled myself and jumped out of the truck, even though I wasn’t supposed to. Under all that, she was still my ma. She had to have something of it in her.

Jaime beat me to it. He hopped down and leaned against the back of the gate, staring the three of them down as they walked up.

Ma pointed her gun at him. “I told you that you’d die,” she said. “I was gonna have her shoot you. Still might. Or I could just do it myself.”

“What’s stopping you?”

She cocked the gun and pointed it at him.

I stepped around the truck to stand next to Jaime. “Ma, stop it. This is crazy.”

She stared at me then. Those eyes. They didn’t belong to Ma at all. Whoever this was, it wasn’t the woman who raised me, who packed my lunches and tended my wounds.

She turned her gun towards me.

I didn’t have a chance to react or think much about it at all. Jaime tackled me to ground out of nowhere, and we slammed into the ragged shoulder of the road with a hard crack. A shot pinged off the metal somewhere over my head.

Ma racked the gun again. I like to think she just meant to scare us, but I can't be sure what it was she was thinking. But before she could shoot, her feet gave way beneath her. The gun hit the dirt in front of me.

Jaime looked up behind us. I peeked back there too. Towering above, gun in position, with an arm pulled free from its sling with nary a sound, stood Brienne. From my vantage point she was otherworldly, mountainous: six feet of righteous fury.

“Lem, Harwin—you touch that gun and she’ll blow your brains out,” Sandor said from somewhere on the side of the truck.

The two men backed toward their car. They got in and drove off without so much as a look back.

Jaime climbed off me and lunged to grab the gun. I sat up, just staring at Ma in the dirt. She lay mostly on her back, arms limp at her sides, her hair swept over her face. I thank God, if he’s out there, for that. Blood pooled on the ground in a dark circle near her head, and I knew she didn’t still draw breath.

Someone grabbed me under my arms and pulled me to my feet. Sandor. “Come on, little bird,” he said, his voice low. “You don’t need to see any more.”

In the back of the truck, Jaime took the gun from Brienne, laid it down at their feet with the old-school rifle the Brothers left behind. He pulled her to sit down with him, put his hand on her face to turn her gaze toward him instead of at Ma, fully dead on the ground, or at me, being led shell-shocked and teary back to the passenger seat. All those years honing her skills with a rifle, shooting at bullseyes—she never intended to make her target to be right between a real live person’s eyes. “It’s going to be all right,” Jaime told her. “You did what you knew needed to be done. You saved all our lives.”

Still today I think there are times when she doesn’t believe him. But she tries.

The hood slammed down eventually and we were on the move. Sandor glanced over at me from time to time as we drove to Pennytree, but we didn’t say a word. The town came to us soon enough. All that time I imagined it to be a sweet little hamlet, with white picket fences and neat lawns. Instead we passed worn down sidewalks and houses with peeling-away paint.

The police station was just another squat building on Main Street, tucked next to the firehouse. We pulled into the parking lot next to three beat-up old cruisers, the state police logo on the door. No one had discussed going to the police. But it was the only place we really could have gone.

The four of us walked in the door and approached a startled receptionist behind a low counter. Under the harsh overhead lights, we were a shocking bunch: a sharp-eyed fellow in obnoxious bright colors, missing a hand; a white-faced giantess with her arm in a makeshift cast; a lumbering, scowling man, taller than all of us, with a scarred face and half a beard; and me, a tiny slip of a thing, red hair falling from my braid and dirt mixed with tears on my face.

Everyone in the room stared at us, like we had just climbed out from graves with dirt still on us. Easy to see why, now. After the plane crash, I wasn’t the only face among us on the news. A champion athlete and the mysterious heir of a media scion, presumed dead—now that’s a story destined to broadcast all over the world.

I took a step toward the woman at the counter. Breathed in big. “Hello, ma’am,” I said. “My name is Sansa Stark, and I’ve been missing. We have some things to tell you.”

* * *

The local and state police had been watching the Brotherhood from a few different angles, as it turns out. The weapons coming in from all over raised one flag. The drugs spreading throughout the area from a man calling himself Brother Greenbeard raised another. Sandor pulled back the canvas to reveal the small arsenal he’d smuggled out, and the police chief whistled in disbelief.

They separated us all for interrogation, though they were calling it ‘just a quick talk about what happened.’ A lady officer got sent in to talk to me. Mya, her name was. Officer Stone. She couldn’t get why I found that so damn funny. She was nice. She brought me coffee and seemed real sympathetic. She believed me when I said that Sandor and Jaime and Brienne didn’t hurt me, that they were my rescuers, my heroes.

They weren’t as nice to Sandor or Brienne. They both got stuck with Officer Frey, who sneered at Brienne for staying several days with a clearly dangerous cult, and at Sandor for staying even longer. But eventually the chief sent him home, because Sandor could give them something they needed: the hidden location of the Brotherhood’s camp.

When they got there a few days later, with backup from the next two counties over and guns at the ready, they found a bloodbath. Bodies lay scattered all over the prayer and mess pavilions, curled in on themselves and each other, attracting files and vermin in the summer heat. Greenbeard didn’t just have sugar pills on hand, it seems. On the news it was said that the compounds in their blood likely caused an excruciating death, gnawing at insides and slowly stealing breath. It was too easy to picture the horror that unfolded. The screams, the tears.

They found Thoros and Myranda in his trailer. Too scared to go out like his followers, he’d got his future Lady to put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. Then she did the same to herself. Lady Myr in spirit if not in truth.

That wasn’t the worst of it. In the trees near the well, two bodies swung on ropes from the tallest tree. Jeyne Heddle, forty-six, from Crossroads; Gendry Waters, twenty-four, from King’s Landing. It seemed it had only been a short while after we drove off that Thoros had them strung up. When I heard that I sobbed so much that my head pounded and the muscles in my back ached. It wasn’t fair for them to give their lives for us. I didn’t even remember to grab hold of Jeyne’s tea from the truck when we left it.

The police seized near a quarter million dollars worth of drugs, undisturbed, from the Greenbeards’ trailer. Only a few guns were left, but they seized those too. And in my old trailer, under one of the beds, the greatest discovery of all: two little children, huddled together, hungry and terrified but blessedly still alive. At least that gave the news stations a good story to run in the midst of all the horror, the two of them running into their aunt’s arms after their rescue.

They never could find the man calling himself Brother Stone, also known as Uncle Petyr, also known as pure evil, to me. He skipped town as soon as Lem and Harwin came back saying Brienne killed Ma and drove off with me and Sandor. He was smart enough to know that spelled the end of things. Word was he escaped overseas to Braavos, and good riddance.

After they got our statements, they sent us off to a real hospital, over an hour away. I was fine, aside from my nerves, so frayed that they barely existed. Sandor brought me a cookie from a vending machine and we walked over to see how the others were doing. Jaime and Brienne both needed x-rays and antibiotics and, later, surgeries—Jaime’s emergency amputation hadn’t been anywhere near clean and Brienne had rebroken her broken arm two times since getting off that plane. They were both in a foul mood about it; I suspected more so that they’d been split up than anything else.

Officer Mya offered to get us motel rooms, but I didn’t feel right leaving the others, and Sandor didn’t feel right leaving me, so we posted up out in the hallway on a bench halfway between Jaime and Brienne’s rooms. Later that night, Mya held a phone to my ear: Arya, crying. “I should have gone with you,” I told her, crying back. Jon was already on a cross-country plane to pick me up.

I fell asleep on Sandor’s shoulder, and when I woke, neck stiff, my half-brother was standing there before me. Brienne cried when we came into her room together to say goodbye. Jaime was in surgery. She promised to pass along my thanks. I wouldn’t have survived without him.

I hugged Sandor farewell: an awkward embrace, all of two seconds. He brushed aside my thanks and told me to take care of myself. When Jon and I were halfway down the hall, I turned to look at him over my shoulder, a lump in my throat. He just stood there, in the middle of the corridor, hands in his pockets, watching me go.

We were back in the house from my childhood years by nightfall. While I’d been gone, Mr. Bolton had gone and kicked the bucket, and Jon had used the opportunity to take the new owner of Winterfell Oil, Bolton’s son Ramsey, to court. The local papers took to calling the case “The Battle of the Bastards”; Ramsey was the lone product of his daddy’s failed first romance too. The fight was bloody and vicious, and piled a lot of extra stress on Jon while he was still looking for me, but the locals on the jury were all too happy to send the whole Bolton family packing. Back to their offshore rigs down south. The north was for Northerners.

All my siblings ran out the door to greet me: even in the short time away, they were taller and older and wiser than I remembered them. Bran stood a head above me. Rickon’s face was scrubbed clean. When I hugged my sister, I could feel she started wearing a real bra, one with underwire and everything. But despite that, it all felt familiar, too. The dogs barked in the background, and the pine trees swayed fresh and pungent all around, and in that moment, in the crisp Northern summer night air, I felt like I was where I’d always belonged.

* * *

For a good while, that stayed true. I played fetch with the dogs. Made breakfast every day with Arya and packed lunches to send the three of ‘em off to school. Did distance lessons in the mornings at home; I wasn’t up to being around too many strangers, and everyone told me that was OK.

I let Jon take me out far on the land to practice my driving on the service roads in the afternoons. It was the longest I’d ever spent with him; Ma never liked having him around much. He was serious, sometimes moody, but had a sneaky sense of humor and endless patience, too. I came away learning stick and automatic; how to handle trucks and vans and regular little cars, too.

It was nice and easy and safe, being in the north. The media tried to get at us, but it was too arduous to trek all the way out, and those that did had to face an angry Mr. Cassel shooing them off. We got rid of the landline, ‘cause it was always ringing, and just went by cell. Eventually we stopped being interesting, and we could just go about our lives: running the business, caring for the land, growing up.

Many nights, with the Brotherhood, I told myself that if I ever got back home, I’d never leave. Trouble was, although I was back where I grew up, I didn’t ever really feel like I was home. The walls were unchanged but the halls were full of ghosts. Daddy and Robby. Ma, how she was. Me and Arya, how we could’ve been. I was happy to be free, and with my family, but I also carried an ache in my chest.

The week of my seventeenth birthday, I took the test for my diploma, and then I booked a flight out east. Brienne had wired me the money; I wouldn’t get what Daddy left me until I was five and twenty. After she recovered from her surgeries, it was clear that her days of Global Games athletics were behind her, and so she retreated back to where she grew up, too. She ran her daddy’s vacation homes and beaches in the summer and started up her own gun club to train the next generation in the off-season. She got my number from Officer Mya, and texted from time to time to see how I was.

When I told her about the ghosts, she suggested that I come out to visit. The beaches are beautiful, and there’s work if you want it.

My siblings hugged me goodbye at the airport, smiles on their faces but resigned sadness in their eyes. I think they knew before I did that I wasn’t fixing to come back.

I had a window seat on the plane, and I watched the whole of the country unfurl below me. The cool grey lands of the north; the craggy lands of the west, seals on the coast beyond my line of vision. Clouds obscured the mountains of the Vale, and I was glad. The neat golden fields of the Reach gave way to the soft, rolling hills of the Riverlands, and their emerald beauty almost made me forget of all the pain I found there.

I rented a car when we landed in Storm’s End and drove out of the city and across the long bridge to Tarth. The spring air was warm, and the sunset golden against the deep blue water on either side of me. I wore sunglasses for the first time in years.

I wasn’t surprised to see Jaime there, when I pulled up to Brienne’s house. He would have followed her anywhere after what they went through. I’d have been happy just to carry her gym bag, he told me. I couldn’t imagine just going back to my old sad life.

They gave me my own little cottage down the street from theirs, with its own deck and a wooden walkway over the dunes and out to the beach. We cooked dinners together, ate outside in the evening breeze; Jaime snuck me beers in travel mugs when Brienne wasn’t looking. They told me this story then, the very one I’ve been telling you. 

During the day I cleaned houses for Brienne. I changed sheets and mopped floors and wiped out refrigerators. It was hard work, and left me tuckered out most days, but it was something I made for myself, and so I couldn’t help but love it.

We had visitors, over time. Jaime’s rakish little brother, Tyrion, looking for a respite from the city. Brienne’s goofy wingman, Podrick, and his rotating cast of giggly girlfriends. Even my family came once, and we spent the week together in a big two-story house on the water, laughing at memories and playing games out on the deck late into the night.

And then there was Sandor. He showed up without warning one day, at the main office, asking for Brienne. He had tried to go home, but found that he really didn’t have anywhere to go. Jaime offered to go clean out one of the smaller cottages for him, but I said there was no need. I had space in mine.

You might not approve; Brienne sure doesn’t. He’s twice your age, Sansa, she said, warily; you shouldn’t be letting him anywhere near your bed. I pointed out that Jaime’s not exactly close to her age, either, and received that glare of hers, the one she usually saves for him.

Anyway, I didn’t just invite him to my bed. I invited him into my home and those things are different. The rest came later, though it was in my mind and his a long time coming. I’m old enough now to go off to die for my country out in the Red Waste; I can certainly decide who has my heart and all the other parts of me too.

This summer, there will be a wedding. Not mine—it’s much too soon for that. Jaime and Brienne are the ones who are saying their vows. Just them and a small handful of guests on the beach, in a ceremony with zero prayers, administered by a justice of the peace.

I’m planning the flowers and the dinner we’re going to throw on the grassy lawn up by the lighthouse. Sandor says I’m getting way too into it. But I don’t give a damn what he thinks. It’s a new beginning, the start of a whole new story, and there’s nothing that brings me more joy than that.

**Author's Note:**

> Some folks wanted my cult jams playlist—here’s the version I used while writing this fic.


End file.
